 Thanks very much for the invitation to share some ideas with you. This talk draws both on my own research and on my interpretation of trends in the emerging field of transparency, participation and accountability. The subtitle here from participation to accountable governance points to this talk's focus on identifying some of the missing links between the two. Today I'm gonna discuss some concepts that can help to identify how participation might contribute to accountable governance. Next slide, please. The presentation draws from the keywords approach, which is used across a wide range of disciplines to unpack big concepts whose meanings are often taken for granted, yet in practice their meanings are often constructed and contested. And I make the case that this exercise is relevant for research collaboration because we need a shared vocabulary in order to communicate effectively. Next slide, please. To start off, it turns out that the concepts of participation and accountability both share the major conceptual challenge of being taken for granted. For each one, we think we know it when we see it. It means all things to all people. And the meanings get stretched so far that they get watered down. And this is especially problematic if we're interested in understanding what works when the concepts are defined with a very low bar. For example, tests of the impacts of tiny bits of participation or accountability are unlikely to tell us very much about whether more ambitious efforts could make more of a difference. And similarly, when it comes to measurement, it turns out that numerous field experiments in this field use very fuzzy proxies to draw what turn out to be rather shaky conclusions. The studies that use field experiments very rarely use robust indicators of participation or accountability. Next slide, please. To follow up on the issue of conceptual stretching, it's also relevant to clear the air by recognizing that there are a whole series of terms that are often used as synonyms for accountable governance. And the point here is that terms like good governance, for example, overlap with accountable governance, but they are not synonyms. After all, competent technocrats can produce certain kinds of good governance without being publicly accountable at all. Next slide, please. Now, here's an exercise in visualizing this conceptual distinction. This diagram depicts both the overlap and the distinction between responsive governance and accountable governance, terms that are often used interchangeably in different programming, for example. On the far left, the diagram indicates a zone of responses from authorities that do not involve answerability or some kind of an enforcement of standards, just concessions to actors who are exercising some kind of voice or pressure. And on the far right, one has top-down accountability processes that do not involve responses to voice. The term rule by-law refers to judicial or administrative processes that are selective or biased in some way, in contrast to the principle of the rule of law, which we associate with accountability, which requires that all are treated equally. And then in the zone of overlap between responsive and accountable governance, we have public answerability processes, where authorities meet their commitments and do what they say they're gonna do. Next slide, please. If we then turn to what counts as accountability, most analysts in this emerging field agree that it involves these two key processes. Answerability, where decision-makers or duty-bearers must render an account, must explain and justify their actions, usually in some kind of forum. The classic case would be when cabinet ministers report to parliament, or when ostensibly co-equal members of a multi-stakeholder forum report to each other. And the second key element involves some kind of tangible consequences related to that account, involving enforcement of standards. And this can involve both negative sanctions and positive rewards. Some analysts lean more towards emphasizing the answerability process, others focus more on tangible consequences. And I would add that the conventional approach to accountability is mainly ex-post. It's mainly retrospective. But one can also consider preventative approaches, approaches that try to make the likelihood of accountability failures, to reduce the likelihood of these failures. And as the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, or in Spanish, más vale prevenir que lamentar. And this points to a new frontier in this field, which involves thinking about how to maximize the synergy between preventative and reactive approaches to accountability building. Next slide, please. Now, since accountability is necessarily a relational process, actor X is or is not accountable to actor Y, it's also useful to consider spatial metaphors that can capture this directionality. Three adjectives make this distinction. And first, we have vertical accountability, which can go in two opposite directions. It can go upwards, like from NGOs to donors, for example, or downwards accountability, which is the ostensible relationship between say elected officials and voters or citizens. And then we have horizontal accountability, which refers to the mutual accountability between ostensible co-equals, as in the case of political systems that have checks and balances between the executive and legislative and judicial branches, or also between the co-equal members of classic common property resource management institutions. And then diagonal accountability, as the term suggests, is cross-cutting. It refers to power sharing institutions or forums that bridge power holders and often underrepresented stakeholders, as in the case of multi-stakeholder forums or participatory budgeting, or some kinds of social funds or social audits that bring together citizen watchdogs and public oversight agencies. Next slide, please. When it comes to figuring out what works in this field, much of the empirical research has concentrated on testing only one specific theory of change, which is inspired by an idea that comes from a century ago in the early years of public interest law. You may have heard the phrase, sunshine is the best disinfectant. And this can be diagrammed as transparency drives accountability. And this frame was then revised when donors and analysts realized that the formulation took for granted a missing link, because the ostensible causal mechanism is that transparency or that disclosure of relevant information is expected to inform and motivate participation, which in turn is expected to drive accountability. So in that diagram, T leads to P leads to A. And we also have in the middle a relatively widely used acronym, TAP, which is widely used, for example, in the sustainable development goal context. And this means the same thing as TPA, but it's easier to say, even though the acronym implicitly flips the causal arrows. Now, this proposed theory of change is quite linear. Next slide, please. And my emergent and many change initiatives in this field suggests that we also, we've considered other causal mechanisms that may be more difficult to test in a field experiment, but which may more closely reflect the way the world actually works. So in this view, accountable governance is driven by processes of reciprocal interaction between participation, transparency and accountability. For example, participation may turn out to be a precondition to get the kind of transparency that is needed to inform and motivate the broader and deeper patterns of participation that turn out to be needed to get some degree of accountability. So in terms of the diagram, this dynamic would be captured as P leads to T leads to P leads to A, for example. Next slide, please. So today's presentation draws from a work in progress that is tackling the job of unpacking a series of keywords that are significant in the accountability field. And for reasons of time, I'll focus on just two of them, social accountability and strategy and tactics. Next slide, please. Social accountability is a term that began to be widely used in the development industry about 15 years ago. And it's a broad umbrella category that covers very diverse initiatives that share the goal of encouraging social and civic actors to get directly involved in the public oversight of governments and also private corporations. Some would argue that the term is an example of old wine in new bottles since it covers much of what used to be called participatory development. And in response, advocates of the term would contend that while both indeed emphasize citizen voice and action, the idea of social accountability focuses more on both the systemic monitoring of how authorities exercise power and on whether and how authorities actually respond to citizen voice and action. And if we look beyond the English speaking world, diverse Latin American governments began promoting social accountability initiatives back in the 1990s long before the term was used in English. Under the rubric of terms like control social, velduria or contraria social. Next slide, please. So there's now an extensive body of research on social accountability that tests the T-A theory of change that I mentioned before. And the results are definitely mixed with many initiatives leading to little or no impact. The participatory processes that were supposed to link participation with accountability often get little attention. And invited spaces turn out to be limited or captured. And even when public oversight managed to identify problems and local watchdogs spoke out, their voices were easily ignored by authority, limited bite. And yet at the same time, sometimes if these efforts did pay off. So what makes the difference? Next slide, please. I propose an interpretation of these mixed results in an article back in world development. And the idea here is that where social accountability initiatives are limited to tactical tool-led approaches, one should expect little to no impact. Whereas the results are more promising for strategic approaches. And this underscores the relevance of unpacking the ideas of strategy and tactics as keywords themselves. Strategies refer to change goals and the pathways to reach them. Whereas tactics are the specific actions and tools that are deployed on these pathways. Next slide, please. Tool-led approaches to social accountability share several features. And the first is that they emphasize information provision easier through local interface meetings between service providers and communities or through some kind of civic tech, like an app for reporting on service delivery performance, do the irrigation districts actually deliver the water they're supposed to. And tool-led approaches focus on encouraging voice without actually changing the institutions that are supposed to listen. They're also exclusively local rather than multi-level or multi-scaler. Next slide, please. Strategic approaches in contrast bring together multiple tactics in a coordinated way so that the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts. They also involve proactive measures that can reduce the risks or the costs of collective action. And maybe they go farther by bolstering the capacity of social organizations to both represent their constituencies. And ideally, they also involve changes on the part of the authorities that bolster their own capacity to respond, such as grievance redress mechanisms, for example, that actually have the autonomy and the capacity that is needed to actually redress grievances in contrast to the complaint collection boxes that are easy to ignore. Strategic approaches are also not circumscribed to the local arena so that voice and action can project upwards, can reach higher levels where the key decisions are often made. So to sum up the subtext behind this distinction between strategy and tactics is the goal of bringing a power analysis to bear on the question of how participation can leverage accountability. Next slide, please. As an example of a strategic approach to social accountability, consider vertical integration. Next slide, please. And this multi-level approach might resonate with those of you who are concerned with scale. Our research centers engage with several counterpart public interest groups around the world that pursue this approach which seeks two different kinds of synergy. First, it involves positive feedback loops between independent monitoring of what the public sector does for private corporations and advocacy targeted to improve those institutions' performance. Second, this strategy coordinates monitoring and advocacy across multiple levels at the same time. The goal is to ensure that voice and action are targeted to the decision makers that actually have authority over the problem that people are trying to address. For example, why focus participation efforts on municipal governments if they don't have the authority or the resources to address the issue at hand? This might make sense on the other hand if the goal is to recruit those municipal authorities to advocate upwards to the provincial or national authorities, but it's key to know where the real power lies. This multi-level approach also tries to address the problem of squeezing the balloon where representatives of social organizations reach out to one level or branch of government and those authorities then point the finger at another set of authorities who in turn point the finger at another set of authorities sending the social organization in circles as no authority takes responsibility for the issue. Comprehensive systemic independent monitoring of the full supply chain of decision making, if you will, is intended to reveal where the key decisions are really made to inform social actors' decisions about which door to knock on. Since many of you are interested in multi-stakeholder forums when considering their role in vertical integration, they could themselves be the actors who are doing multi-level monitoring and advocacy, but also independent actors that participate within those multi-stakeholder forums could also be engaged with their own multi-level monitoring of relevant authorities that are present perhaps both inside and outside of those forums to understand better what the rest of those authorities are doing. This can help to better assess the authorities' claims about what they can and cannot do and to assess whether those authorities are actually meeting their commitments. One last point about multi-stakeholder forums, what happens if we look at them through the lens of the distinction between strategy and tactics? This raises the issue of different positionalities because for some participants in multi-stakeholder forums, they might constitute strategies, while for others, they might simply be tactics, one of many that they're pursuing. Where you stand depends on where you sit. Next slide, please. The final conceptual point I wanna make here offers a way of thinking about social actors' voice and action and how they interact with institutions to identify possible pathways towards improved governance. So first, if we're starting from a low accountability point of departure, it's worth recognizing that that could constitute a low accountability trap in the sense that the problems are self-reinforcing. The challenge then is how to turn those vicious circles, self-reinforcing, into virtuous circles of self-reinforcing motion towards more accountable governance. This recalls the reciprocal model of dynamic change processes mentioned earlier. So voice here is shorthand for the aggregation and the representation of underrepresented actors which includes the capacity for collective action. This goes well beyond simply having a seat at the table in invited spaces. Intuitively, the term teeth can refer to possible sanctions which is a key element of accountable governance but here the term is used more broadly as shorthand for institutional capacity to respond to voice. Next slide, please. This final diagram illustrates the proposition that synergistic interaction between voice and teeth can drive movement towards improved institutional performance. Possible pathways can be more voice led or they can be more teeth led as shown here but the proposition is that action is needed in both arenas to trigger and sustain virtuous circles, processes of mutual empowerment where each reinforce the other. So to conclude, when we step back to consider what works in the social accountability field, the main takeaway and next slide here can be summed up in the next slide. To voice needs teeth to have bite but teeth may not bite without voice. Thank you very much. Just a comment on the relationship between multi-stakeholder forums and accountable governance more generally. The first question, I think it's important to break this down into at least two distinct steps. One is how does participation of different actors influence the forum itself and this raises the question of where are the proactive measures to address the power imbalances among the actors who are going in? What are the, to what degree are there processes of capacity building and that can help to address the very imbalanced power relation among the participants. But the second point is how then can multi-stakeholder forums influence other actors who may not even be in the room as in some of the cases that we heard about. And this really gets to the question of how to go beyond thinking of participation as somehow always good, even if we only get little bits of it and step back and think, what difference does it really make? It raises the issue of what are the goals of these forums and if the goal is really power sharing over the management of resources, how to really go beyond getting a seat at the table as an in and itself to really tangibly influence the management of resources, including the role of actors who are not even in the room, but who may be the main problem. Thank you very much. I'm gonna just say a few words about two cross-cutting issues that I'm seeing. One is governance and the other is scale and scaling and on them, the first cross-cutting issue, it really strikes me just how consistently the issue of overlapping governance regimes comes up in these presentations. Primarily focused on overlapping governance of property rights and land rights, but not exclusively. And it raises the question of what happens if one starts by looking at landscape and then ends up with governance, you see the world one way and if you start by looking at governance and then look at property rights, when things may look somewhat differently, I think both approaches are complementary. And when I think in terms of overlapping regimes, it makes me wonder who, how do those regimes decide who has standing? Who are the key decision makers in each of those regimes? How do they engage with each other? Because property rights in those regimes are the results of each respective governance process. So how does one unpack those respective processes? And if one is interested in accountability, then how does each governance regime, do they allow forms of recourse if there are disagreements about how rights are allocated, for example. And specifically, of course, we have the cross cutting issue of the interaction between customary and formal legal land tenure and many of the presentations engage with that. And I'm curious, what happens if one goes upstream to look at how those systems engage to then produce the kind of diverse results that one actually sees on the ground? And this would be, I think this kind of diagnosis of the interface or interaction between governance regimes is very relevant, for example, for identifying, what are the possible entry points for addressing issues like gender equality? The context is what are the synergies and tensions between those overlapping governance regimes? How can the tensions be managed? How can the synergies be maximized? In this context, one has issues to call, some of the issues I mentioned last week, different actors may have different understandings of responsiveness, of what responsible leadership looks like, about what accountable governance looks like. Those are all concepts that are overlapping but distinct and may reflect the different, not only cultures, but positionalities of the different actors involved in governance. Similarly, in the context of multi-stakeholder forums, which would be potentially a hybrid or bridging of different governance regimes, my question would be, what do the multi-stakeholder forums actually govern? What do they have power over? Seems to be a key question. And then in terms of what's the context going further upstream for governance itself, I think I saw in a couple of presentations the reference to the distinction between strategies and policies. And it may be worth pursuing that distinction if we could think of policies as referring to official or governmental frameworks and mandates, what are the rules and what is the resource allocation that's coming from official authorities. And whereas strategies makes me think more of the actors involved, both inside and outside official authority structures. So what's the interplay between policies as a framework and strategies as an idea that refers to the goals and actions pursued by specific actors that are navigating those policy contexts. And then turning to the issue of scale and scaling that came up in the context, particularly of agroforestry, this also recalls some of my comments for last week, which is that when it comes to scale or scaling, it's very common to think, well, you know it when you see it. And I think it's useful to, I'm gonna offer a brief conceptual framework that distinguishes between one particular approach to scale and then other approaches to scale. The classic and dominant approach to scale thinks about scale in terms of scaling up of more and bigger. And I think that it's important to distinguish that from three other approaches to scale. And the umbrella frame that I'm gonna propose is how does one take scale into account? That framing is broader than looking at scale in the sense of volume, bigger, or, and so if we go beyond scaling up, then another approach to take scale into account involves looking at dynamics of diffusion. What does the dynamic of horizontal replication pilot to spreading that pilot, that's the dynamic of horizontal replication is not the same as simply doing something more or bigger. The second alternative way of taking scale into account involves the concept that political sociologists talk about as a scale shift. How do initiatives jump scales from the local to the subnational or to the national? Or how do they jump scales from the national to the local if we think about scaling down? So scale shift is, I would argue distinct from, say, scaling up. And then the last alternative way of taking scale into account involves multi-level approaches. And here we heard a couple of references to multi-level governance. So this is an alternative approach to scale that thinks about levels. And that's distinct from scaling up, which involves, again, the assumption of how to get to more or bigger. And in my own work, the particular approach to multi-level governance that I've been focusing on is working with vertical integration of independent monitoring and also a public interest advocacy, which involves the simultaneous engagement with multiple levels of decision-making at the same time. And I mentioned that briefly last week. So just to sum up, these four ways of taking scale into account involve scaling up, diffusion or horizontal replication, scale shift, and multi-level approaches. And I'm thinking specifically of vertical integration. And so just to then sum up, to keep it short, I think it's useful to think both, how does one go from landscapes to governance and how one goes from governance to landscapes? And the underlying issue with landscape governance seems to me to be who decides, who has standing and how do they decide? Thank you very much.